BlogBack: NEA’s Research Director on Artists’ Employment and Fellowships

Sunil Iyengar, the National Endowment for the Arts' director of research and analysis, responds to Artists' Jobs: Even Worse than NEA's New Report Suggests (and I respond to his response, below):

I wanted to try to clarify our team's perspective on two important issues you raise:

First, know that we would have welcomed a chance to run a comparison of fourth-quarter 2008 "art-related income" with that of the 2007 quarter, but those data were unavailable at the time of our study. We used, in our view, the most directly applicable numbers to tell the story of artist employment over this turbulent period.

The measure is imperfect insofar as it excludes self-described artists who have a primary job (in terms of number of hours worked) as a non-artist. Still, it is the best available national data tool, tracking artists as a distinct category of workers for more than 30 years. Further, having obtained unpublished data about quarterly employment rates from the Department of Labor, we thought the public should see how the trend fares for artists.

The second clarification addresses perhaps a misunderstanding. In your Mar. 4 posting, you state: "If the NEA really cares about the plight of unemployed artists, its action plan to address the findings of its own research report should be to reinstate individual artists' fellowships."

As you are aware, the NEA is currently prohibited by law [scroll to p. 5, "Grants to Individuals"] from awarding funds directly to artists. Despite this inability, the NEA demonstrates its concern for essential needs of artists through the funding of touring programs that have employed thousands of actors, dancers, and musicians; through playwright development programs to create new work; and through teacher-artist training to provide professional development, to name a few initiatives.

By funding organizations, in fact, the monies often can benefit more artists than would a grant to a single artist. For example, a $30,000 grant to CityFolk in Ohio benefits more than 140 folk artists. A $30,000 to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire helps provide residencies for eight artists. A $10,000 grant to the Cantata Singers in Massachusetts supports their commissioning series of work about oppressed peoples.

CultureGrrl comments:

If "a great nation deserves great art," as NEA's logo (above) proclaims, then NEA needs to provide direct recognition and support to the people most responsible for our nation's "great art"---our individual creative artists. This is important not only for the direct financial benefit to the recipients, but also for the ripple effect that this recognition can have on the artist's career and on our nation's regard for the creative profession.

Through its chairman (if only it had one), NEA should ask Congress to rescind its ban on most individual artists' fellowships (the exceptions to the ban: literature fellowships, national heritage fellowships and American jazz masters fellowships). That prohibition became effective in 1997 (and is carried forward each year in NEA's appropriations bill), in a very different political and cultural climate from the one in which we find ourselves today.

By the way, while I certainly have nothing against cultural journalists (purporting to be one myself), why is our federal arts agency spending money on a program for journalists that could more appropriately be applied to support the arts and artists?